At the start of 2018 I made a conscious choice to read more books and consume less social media. As has become increasingly clear over the past couple of years, social media is consuming the individuals that use it, rather than the other way round (the average time spent on social media globally per day…

It’s medicines safety week this week, and medicines continue to be an avoidable harm of modern healthcare. Modern pharmacovigilance stems from the birth defects arising from the use of thalidomide, but despite improvements in pharmacovigilance new issues arise with both new medicines and ancient medicines. Some issues with well established drugs can rumble on for years…

The use of a multi compartment compliance aid (MCA) or monitored dosage systems (MDS), as pictured above, is often seen as an easy way to deal with the sometimes complex problems of ensuring patients take their medicines. There is scant evidence of benefit, and they aren’t without harm. In one area of the UK it…

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has begun to migrate to Amsterdam. The relationship the UK will have with EMA is up in the air, but already the changes are having an effect on the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s (MHRA) work. They are beginning to fail to win new contracts for and lose…

Should you spend time arguing with anti-vaccine lobby on the internet? After all, someone is always wrong on the internet and duty calls. A paper analysing a retrospective set of 1.8 million tweets suggests caution is required.1 David Broniatowski and colleagues examined vaccine-related tweets in this sample, and compared how normal users posted vaccine messages…

Communicating the positive harm-benefit of vaccines is complex. Vaccination scares cause real harm. As one example, let’s take measles vaccination. Vaccination with measles occurs through the administration of MMR vaccine. Vaccination rates in many European states do not provide herd immunity against measles. Data from The European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. This leads…